by Primo Levi
In the extremely complex tangle of peoples and nations in conflict with one another, the history of the Jewish people has some particular characteristics. The Jews were (and in part still are) the repository of a strong internal bond, both religious and traditional in nature; as a result, in spite of their numerical and military inferiority, they opposed the Roman conquest with desperate courage, and though they were defeated, deported, and dispersed, the bond survived. The Jewish colonies that developed along all the coasts of the Mediterranean and, later, in the Middle East, Spain, the Rhineland, southern Russia, Poland, Bohemia, and elsewhere remained stubbornly faithful to that bond, which had been consolidated in the form of an immense body of written laws and traditions, a minutely codified religion, and a particular and conspicuous set of rituals, which pervaded all the actions of daily life. The Jews, a minority in all their settlements, were therefore different, recognizable as different, and often proud, rightly or wrongly, of their differences. All this made them vulnerable, and they were harshly persecuted, in almost all countries and all centuries; some reacted to persecution by assimilating, or by blending in with the surrounding population, the majority by immigrating again, to more hospitable countries. In that way, however, their “differentness” was renewed, exposing them to new restrictions and persecutions.
Although in its deepest essence anti-Semitism is an irrational instance of intolerance, it assumed a predominantly religious, or, rather, theological, guise in all Christian countries, starting with the establishment of Christianity as a state religion. According to St. Augustine, the Jews are condemned to diaspora by God himself, and for two reasons: because they are being punished for not having recognized Christ as the Messiah, and because their presence in all countries is necessary to the Catholic Church, which itself is everywhere, so that everywhere the deserved unhappiness of the Jews may be visible to the faithful. Thus the diaspora and segregation of the Jews will never end: with their sufferings, they must forever bear witness to their error and, consequently, to the truth of the Christian faith. And since their presence is necessary, they are to be persecuted but not killed.
Yet the Church did not always seem so moderate: since the early centuries of Christianity a heavier charge has been brought against the Jews, that they are, collectively and eternally, responsible for the crucifixion of Christ, in other words, the “deicide people.” This formulation, which appears in the Easter liturgy in remote times, and was suppressed only by Vatican II (1962–1965), is at the origin of various pernicious and constantly revived popular beliefs: that by poisoning wells, Jews spread the plague; that they habitually profane the sacred Host; that at Passover they kidnap Christian babies and smear their blood on the unleavened bread. These beliefs have offered a pretext for numerous bloody slaughters, and also for the mass expulsion of the Jews from France and England, and then from Spain and Portugal (1492–1498).
Passing through an uninterrupted series of massacres and migrations, we reach the nineteenth century, which is marked by a general awakening of national consciences and recognition of the rights of minorities: with the exception of tsarist Russia, in all Europe the legal restrictions placed on Jews, which had been called for by the Christian churches, were lifted (depending on the place and time, the obligation to reside in ghettos or special areas, the obligation to wear a mark on their clothing, the prohibition against entering certain careers or professions, the prohibition against mixed marriages, and so on). Anti-Semitism survives, however, especially in countries where a crude religiosity continued to point to Jews as the killers of Christ (in Poland and Russia), and where nationalistic claims had left a wake of general aversion toward neighbors and foreigners (in Germany but also in France, where, at the end of the nineteenth century, an alliance of priests, nationalists, and the military unleashed a violent wave of anti-Semitism, based on the false charge of high treason brought against Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army).
In Germany, especially, for the entire previous century an uninterrupted series of philosophers and politicians had promoted the fanatical theory that the German people, for too long divided and humiliated, were supreme in Europe and perhaps the world, the heir to remote and noble traditions and civilizations, and made up of individuals essentially homogeneous by blood and race. The German people were therefore meant to establish a strong military state, hegemonic in Europe, and clothed in an almost divine majesty.
This idea of the mission of the German nation survived the defeat of the First World War, and emerged strengthened by the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. It was appropriated by one of the most sinister and evil characters in history, the political agitator Adolf Hitler. The German bourgeois and industrialist classes heed his fiery speeches: Hitler looks promising, he manages to turn against the Jews the loathing that the German proletariat feels for the classes that led the country to defeat and economic disaster. Within a few years, starting in 1933, Hitler is able to take advantage of the anger of a humiliated country and the nationalist pride roused by the prophets who preceded him: Luther, Fichte, Hegel, Wagner, Gobineau, Chamberlain, Nietzsche. He is obsessed by the thought of a dominant Germany, not in the distant future but immediately, and not through a civilizing mission but by force of arms. Everything that is not Germanic appears to him inferior, in fact despicable, and Germany’s prime enemies are the Jews, for reasons that Hitler proclaims with dogmatic fury: because they have “different blood”; because they are related to other Jews, in England, in Russia, in America; because they are heirs of a culture in which people argue and discuss before obeying, and are forbidden to bow before idols, while he aspires to be venerated as an idol, and doesn’t hesitate to proclaim that “we must not trust intelligence and conscience but place all our faith in instincts.” Finally, many German Jews hold important positions in the economy, in finance, in the arts, in science, and in literature: Hitler, a failed painter and failed architect, pours out onto the Jews the resentment and envy of frustration.
This seed of intolerance, falling on ground that is already prepared, takes root there with incredible vigor but in new forms. Anti-Semitism in the Fascist mold, which the Word proclaimed by Hitler awakens in the German people, is more barbaric than all its precedents. It melds artificially distorted biological doctrines, according to which the weak races should yield to the strong; absurd folk beliefs that common sense had buried for centuries; and ceaseless propaganda. Extremes never before seen are reached. Judaism is not a religion that one can escape by baptism, or a cultural tradition that one can abandon for another: it is a human subspecies, a race different and inferior to all others. The Jews are only apparently human beings: in reality they are something different, abominable and indefinable, “whose distance from the Germans is greater than the distance between man and ape.” They are responsible for everything, for rapacious American capitalism and Soviet Bolshevism, for the defeat of 1918, the inflation of 1923; liberalism, democracy, socialism, and communism are Satanic Jewish inventions, which threaten the monolithic solidity of the Nazi state.
The passage from theoretical preaching to practical action was rapid and brutal. In 1933, just two months after Hitler came to power, the first concentration camp, Dachau, came into being. In May of that year the first pyre of books by Jewish writers or enemies of Nazism was set alight (more than a hundred years earlier Heine, a German Jewish poet, had written, “Where they have burned books they will end in burning men”). In 1935 anti-Semitism was codified in a set of monumental and extremely detailed laws, the Nuremberg Laws. In 1938, in a single night of disturbances led from the top, 191 synagogues and thousands of Jewish shops were destroyed. In 1939 the Jews of newly occupied Poland were shut in ghettos. In 1940 the Auschwitz Lager was opened. In 1941–42 the extermination machine was fully functioning; in 1944 the number of victims rose into the millions.
The hatred and contempt spread by Nazi propaganda found their fulfillment in the daily activity of the extermination camps. Here wa
s not only death but a host of maniacal and symbolic details, all intended to demonstrate and confirm that Jews, and Gypsies, and Slavs are beasts, fodder, garbage. Recall the tattoo of Auschwitz, which branded men with the mark that is used for oxen; the journey in cattle cars that were never opened, forcing the deportees to lie for days in their own filth; the number used in place of the name; the failure to distribute spoons (and yet the storehouses of Auschwitz, at liberation, contained quintals of them), so that the prisoners would have to lick up their soup like dogs; the pitiless exploitation of the corpses, treated like some anonymous matter, the gold extracted from the teeth, the hair serving as material for textiles, the ashes for agricultural fertilizers; men and women debased to guinea pigs, used in medical experiments and then killed.
The very method that was chosen (after careful experimentation) for extermination was openly symbolic. The same poison gas employed for disinfesting ships’ holds and rooms infested by bedbugs or lice was to be used, and was used.
As is well-known, the work of extermination was quite far advanced. The Nazis, although they were engaged in a bitter war that by this point was defensive, manifested an inexplicable hurry: the convoys of victims intended for the gas chambers, or to be transferred from the Lagers near the front, had precedence over military transports. The extermination wasn’t completed only because Germany was defeated. The political will that Hitler dictated a few hours before killing himself, with the Russians a few meters away, ended thus: “Above all, I order the government and the German people to maintain the racial laws in full force, and to fight relentlessly the poisoner of all nations, international Judaism.”
Summing up, we can therefore state that anti-Semitism is a specific case of intolerance; that for centuries it had a mainly religious character; that in the Third Reich it was exacerbated by the nationalistic and militaristic propensity of the German people, and by the peculiar “differentness” of the Jewish people; that it was easily disseminated throughout Germany and, in large part, Europe, thanks to the effectiveness of Fascist and Nazi propaganda, which needed a scapegoat on which to unload all blame and all resentments; and that the phenomenon was brought to a fever pitch by Hitler, a maniacal dictator.
Yet I have to admit that these generally accepted explanations do not satisfy me: they are reductive, not commensurate, not proportional to the facts to be explained. In rereading the accounts of Nazism, from its murky beginnings to its violent end, I can’t escape the impression of a general atmosphere of unrestrained madness that seems to me unique in history. This collective madness, this derailment, is usually explained by assuming a combination of many different factors, insufficient if taken singly, and the biggest of these factors is the personality of Hitler, and his profound interaction with the German people. Certainly his personal obsessions, his capacity for hatred, his preaching of violence found a far-reaching echo in the frustration of the German people, which came back to him multiplied, confirming his delirious conviction that he was the Hero prophesied by Nietzsche, the Superman redeemer of Germany.
Much has been written on the origin of his hatred of the Jews. It has been said that Hitler poured out on the Jews his hatred of the entire human race; that he recognized in Jews some of his own defects, and that, hating the Jews, he hated himself; that the violence of his loathing came from the fear that he might have “Jewish blood” in his veins.
Yet again: these do not seem to me adequate explanations. It doesn’t seem right to explain a historical phenomenon by placing all the blame on an individual (those who carry out horrific orders are not innocent!), and, besides, it is always difficult to interpret the deep motivations of an individual. The hypotheses that have been proposed justify the facts only in part; they explain the quality but not the quantity. I have to admit that I prefer the humility with which some of the most serious historians (Bullock, Schramm, Bracher) confess that they do not comprehend Hitler’s furious anti-Semitism and, following him, Germany’s.
Perhaps what happened cannot be comprehended, or, rather, shouldn’t be comprehended, because to comprehend is almost to justify. Let me explain: “to comprehend” a human intention or behavior means (etymologically as well) to contain it, to contain the author, put oneself in his place, and identify with him. Now, no normal man will ever be able to identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and innumerable others. This burdens us, and yet it brings us relief: because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) not be comprehensible to us. They are words and deeds that are not human but, rather, counter-human, without historical precedent, barely comparable to the cruelest events of the biological struggle for existence. War can be traced back to this struggle, but Auschwitz has nothing to do with war; it is not an episode of war, it is not an extreme form of war. War is an everlasting terrible fact: it is deplorable but it is in us, it has a rationality, we “comprehend” it.
But there is nothing rational about the Nazi hatred: it’s a hatred that is not in us; it’s outside of man, a poisonous fruit arising from the deadly trunk of fascism, but outside and beyond fascism itself. We can’t understand it; but we can and must understand its roots, and be on our guard. If understanding is impossible, recognizing is necessary, because what has happened can happen again, consciences can again be seduced and obscured: even our own.
For this reason, reflecting on what happened is a duty for all of us. Everyone has to know, or remember, that Hitler and Mussolini, when they spoke in public, were believed, applauded, admired, and adored like gods. They were “charismatic leaders”; they possessed a secret power of seduction that came not from the credibility or the rightness of the things they said but from the inspiring way in which they said them, from their eloquence, their dramatic art—perhaps instinctive, perhaps patiently practiced and mastered. The ideas they proclaimed weren’t always the same, and in general were abnormal, or foolish, or cruel; and yet they were praised, and followed by millions of the faithful to their death. It should be remembered that those faithful, including the diligent men who carried out inhuman orders, were not born torturers, were not (with few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men. Monsters exist, but they are too few to be truly dangerous; more dangerous are the common men, the bureaucrats ready to believe and to obey without question, like Eichmann, like Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, like Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, like the French soldiers twenty years later, murderers of the Algerians, like the American soldiers thirty years later, murderers in Vietnam.
We must therefore be distrustful of those who try to convince us using tools other than reason, or of charismatic leaders: we must be wary of delegating to others our judgment and our will. Since it’s difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it’s best to be suspicious of all prophets; it’s better to give up revealed truths, even if they thrill us by their simplicity and their splendor, even if we find them convenient because they can be acquired for nothing. It’s better to content ourselves with other, more modest and less exciting truths, those which are gained laboriously, little by little and without shortcuts, through study, discussion, and reasoning, and which can be verified and proved.
It’s obvious that this prescription is too simple to suffice in all cases: a new fascism, with its wake of intolerance, bullying, and servitude, could originate outside our country and be imported into it, arriving on tiptoe, perhaps, and called by other names; or it could be unleashed from inside with a violence that would rout all defenses. Then the counsels of wisdom are no longer useful, and we have to find the strength to resist: in this case, too, the memory of what happened in the heart of Europe, not long ago, can be a support and a warning.
8. What would you be today, if you hadn’t been a prisoner in the Lager? What do you feel when you remember that time? To what factors do you attribute your survival?
Strictly speaking, I don’t know and I can’t know what I would be today if I hadn’t been in the Lager: no man knows his future, a
nd here it would be a matter of describing a future that didn’t exist. There is some sense in trying to make predictions (though they are bound to be approximate) about the behavior of a population, and yet it’s difficult, or impossible, to predict the behavior of an individual, even on a scale of days. Similarly, the physicist can tell very precisely how long it will take a gram of radium to lose half its radioactivity, but he absolutely can’t say when a single atom of that radium will decay. If a man heads toward a fork in the road, and doesn’t take the one to the left, it’s obvious that he’ll take the one to the right; but our choices are almost never between two alternatives alone. Every choice is followed by others, all multiple, and so on into infinity; and, finally, our future also depends heavily on external factors, completely extraneous to our deliberate choices, and on internal factors, of which we are not aware. For these obvious reasons, we can’t know our own future or that of our neighbor; for the same reasons, no one can say what his past would have been “if.”
I can, however, formulate one particular statement, and it’s this: if I hadn’t had the experience of Auschwitz, I probably would not have written anything. I would have had no motivation, no incentive, to write: I had been a mediocre student in Italian and poor in history; physics and chemistry interested me more, and I then chose a profession, chemist, that had nothing in common with the world of the written word. It was the experience of the Lager that forced me to write. I didn’t have to fight laziness, problems of style seemed to me ridiculous, I miraculously found time to write without ever missing an hour of my daily work. It seemed to me that I had this book ready in my head, that I had only to let it out, let it fall onto the paper.